Like what you’re reading? Please let us know by making a donation so that we can continue this work. Please designate your PayPal donation in dollars or Euros to paulbenitzak@gmail.com , or write us at that address to learn how to donate by check. Special thanks today to DI co-founder and long-time supporter Jamie Phillips, who like Rosemarie Castoro created art for many years on the 100 block of SoHo’s Greene Street — where the Dance Insider was born in 1998.

PARIS — The first headline above echoes the way a mentor has characterized these meanderings. If I plead guilty, I could still do with more of Gene Kelly’s aplomb and serendipity in dancing with, wooing, and landing Leslie Caron from the quays of the Left Bank to a Beaux Arts Ball misplaced on the Butte Montmartre. Instead I keep feeling like Henry James’s Lambert Strether, who in “The Ambassadors” has more luck scoring a set of Victor Hugo at a bouquiniste’s Seine-side stand then scoring with an older Frenchwoman who finally rebuffs the middle-aged Boston Brahmin with a dose of Old World cynicism. So after a month — that’s a month too much — of having my American optimism sucked up by the Old World specimen in question, on Saturday I limped up the hill to Belleville, down the hill to a Place de Republique where 30 yellow-flag waving Kurds outnumbered 20 yellow-vest brandishing demonstrators and into the narrow ancient streets of the Marais. If there was too much American signage for my taste — I don’t care if your window boasts that “Our donuts are really fabulous,” would anyone really pay 6 Euros for a krispy-kreme sized beignet and a thimble-scale cup of coffee? — the angst produced by encroaching American cuisine was worth it for the delight of dancing with the Judson-era American artist Rosemarie Castoro on the four floors of the Galerie Thaddaeus Ropac (it’s like a mini-museum except it’s free), where through March 30 curator Anke Kempkes has mounted an extraordinary multi-media (Castoro excelled in all of them) exhibition on the artist who was like Yvonne Rainer, Trisha Brown, Robert Rauschenberg and Allen Ginsberg rolled into one.

Just emerging s I am from break-up, you-just-waisted-my precious-time hell (see above; and click here if you might be the cure), of course the work that moved me the most in Rosemario Castoro: Wherein lies the Space was a quotidian journal that Castoro kept in 1970, when she was in the process of breaking up with fellow artist Carl Andre. (Who would later be charged with — and acquitted of — second-degree murder in the 1985 death of his wife Ana Mendieta after she plummeted from the window of the couple’s 34th-floor apartment at 300 Mercer Street. Mendieta was recently the subject of a major retrospective at Paris’s Jeu de Paume museum; Andre — many of whose exhibitions since Mendieta’s death have been picketed — is included in the Ropac Gallery’s current minimalism show at its space in nearby Pantin, where it hosts a conference on the subject Saturday. RSVP to laura@ropac.net.) Using a stop-watch, Castoro notes how much time simple tasks like opening the door to her studio or carrying a canvas from point x to point y take. If the language is straightforward, the emotional suffering she was going through is nonetheless suggested; for example, in the fact that it takes her 35 minutes to eat an ice cream cone.

In addition to writings, sculptures, paintings, and installation photos, the exhibition also includes the projection of Yvonne Rainer’s 1966 “Carriage Discreteness,” which features Castoro walking determinedly across the stage in its premiere moments, whence my one frustration: Instead of showing the video in a darkened room as is customary, the gallery projects it on a white wall in broad daylight, making it difficult to actually see anything. (You can watch an excerpt here, but ignore the text below the clip as there are some inaccuracies.) The accompanying documentation helps situate Castoro in her milieu and in her epoch: A blow-up of a gathering at her home at 112 Green Street includes an appreciation from Lawrence Weiner, while the program from a performance by the New Poets’ Theater at the Unit Playhouse (157 W. 22nd Street) — with a $1 admission price to see a stellar cast — offers this quaint promise: “In case of sufficient demand there will be a further performance at 10h15 p.m.”

Speaking of demandes — in French, “requests” — mine to the Ropac Gallery for a few images was met with an unexpectedly generous helping of photographs of Castoro in performance and of her most famous installations, sculptures, paintings, and poems. So I think I’ll just shut up now and let Rosemarie Castoro dance across your screen. (If you’re in Paris through March 30, you can even score your own images and informative text; in lieu of the standard one-page information sheet, the gallery offers visitors a free, generously illustrated booklet.)

… But not before a little rant: Given all the Judson-era hype to which I’ve been exposed since I began focusing on dance 27 years ago, including six living in the heart of Greenwich Village (next door to Electric Lady Studios), I was troubled that I’d never heard of Rosemarie Castoro until stumbling into a gallery in the Marais…. and that it took an astute Parisian curator to make up for the superficial curating of a museum in Castoro’s hometown, the Museum of Modern Art, which completely left her out of all the hype it sent out on its recent Judson exhibition. Besides MoMA’s curatorial laziness, a hint to the reason for the larger historic oublie is provided by an Art News cover displayed in the Ropac show which, over a group photo of female artists, ironically asks the question: “Where are all the good male artists?” An answer is suggested by a comment the choreographer Sara Hook made years ago at a New York roundtable discussion on the challenges faced by female dance-makers. In her own eclecticism an artistic descendent of Castoro, Hook pointed out that whereas a male dance star retiring from the stage can simply announce, “Voila, I’m a choreographer,” and the critics who ogled him on stage flock to see his work (that last part is my analysis) female dancers are expected to prove it. In other words, they don’t shout as loudly as their male counterparts. (Living up the street from the Centre National de la Danse, which recently changed its name to the Centre National for l’Art and la Danse — a standard clearly left out when the building, which looks more like a prison than a dance or art center, was designed — I also have to ask why, as far as I can see by its programming material, a center for *art* and *dance* has completely left Castoro out, missing a golden opportunity to coordinate performances with the Ropac, whose Pantin facility is right across the Ourcq canal from the CN “and A” D. Do we really need three months of Xavier Roy — another over-hyped male choreographer?)

In case the Castoro exhibition has you thinking “Ca y est, women artists are finally getting their due alongside their male equals (and inferiors),” think again: Walking up the Street of the Old Temple in the Marais after catching the show, I ran smack dab into the most Lilliputian park in Paris, and whose one remotely adult attraction, a solitary ping-pong table, was surrounded by the smallest of those ugly green ‘off-limits’ construction barriers that continue to blight the city. A park named after the great surrealist artist Leonor Fini. Well, half-named after Fini, who shared the billing with the 17th-century salt tax profiteer who owned the property before the city bought it to house the Picasso museum. That ended up getting a much more luxurious space, while Fini — the woman — got (half) the left-overs. (The name of the park is something like “The Square of the Old-Salt-Leonor-Fini.”) Meanwhile Picasso, the second half of whose oeuvre any child playing in the Old-Salt-Leonor Fini square could scrawl or make with play-dough, is currently sharing his museum with yet another male artist, Alexander Calder, neither of whom can hold a candle to Fini. The fight is not yet over.

(First published on the DI/AV on May 9, 2011 and re-published today in memory of Randy Shilts. Keith Haring is one of the 100,000 Americans and one million people world-wide who had died from AIDS-related illnesses by the end of George H.W. Bush’s presidency, a presidency largely indifferent to their plight. Bush died on Saturday, World AIDS Day, at the age of 94. And the band played on.)

NEW YORK — “These are markers,” Bill T. Jones was telling me. We were at last Wednesday’s opening for the Gladstone Gallery’s ambitious exhibition of the three mammoth works Keith Haring painted in real-time during a series of performances by the Bill T. Jones / Arnie Zane Company in 1982, as well as two long display cases packed with drawings taken from Haring’s notebooks, including a couple of dozen sketches of penises, most poignantly several under which the artist has written, “Drawing penises in front of Tiffany’s.” Jones looked from tableau to tableau, reflected, and added: “I’m a marker.” Only Bill T. Jones can say this without seeming ostentatious or self-important. What he meant is that, like Haring and like the affliction they shared, the one ultimately succumbing and the other surviving, still here, he signified the artistically audacious and personally daring gestalt of a certain New York epoch. Where he was being unfair to himself, though, was that his tone implied the word *was*, and of the three iconic signifiers of the ’80s NY art scene I encountered last Wednesday meandering from Gladstone’s vast Chelsea gallery near the Hudson to the intimate Rattlestick Theater on Waverly Place, where Suzanne Vega was holding court as Carson McCullers, or pretending to, Jones was the only one who was of his time without being trapped in it. That said, with this courageous exhibition, Barbara Gladstone has liberated Haring from the sanitized version that has been passed down to us in the two decades since his death from AIDS-related illnesses in 1990, at the age of 31. If Jones is “Still / Here,” thanks to Gladsone, Haring is here again, in his full unadulterated glory.

It’s not that Haring’s animated tableaux don’t appeal to adults as well as children — they do. But I suspect my own fascination with them is in large part nostalgic, because they recall the at least surface innocence of that period in Greenwich Village, a sort of resurrection of the down but not out Beat spirit of New York in the ‘50s after the anarchic disarray of the ‘60s and the downer of the ‘70s, with its taint of corruption and its tint of soot. Jones danced, Haring made figures who danced — cartoons that managed to be simultaneously hip and naive, innocent rather than ironic — and Vega sang of an innocent neighbor child (his name was Luca, in case you’ve forgotten), beaten by his parents. Even the monotone vocal delivery and accompanying a-musicality of “Tom’s Diner” didn’t prevent that anecdotal anthem from being playful, a romp in an older Manhattan — the diner — seen through the eyes of a hip young singer, perhaps slightly jaded but still able to appreciate the scene she was describing. This was when irony still seemed a novelty.

But wait. Look more deeply at Haring’s murals painted for Jones’s 1982 shows and you see a serpent extending from the prolonged body of one of the dancers. Consider the dozens of drawings of penises, apparently including at least one of his own (one ageing original hipster at Wednesday’s opening, picking a penis to pose by so his friend could take a photo, passed on one which Haring noted was a a true depiction of the author’s, erect, saying, “Not accurate.”), and, being told earlier in the day by another survivor about what John Giorno wrote about having anonymous sex with Haring in the subway bathrooms of New York while others watched, one also has to recall the moment it all came crashing down in a shower of T-cells, and Haring’s death at 31 of AIDS.

When I told my AIDS survivor friend that I was considering publishing Haring’s sketches under which he has written “Drawing penises in front of Tiffany’s,” (part of his 1978 series, “Manhattan Penis Drawings for Ken Hicks”), juxtaposing them with the fact of his dying of what Prince called the big disease with a little name, my friend suggested I would be stigmatizing Haring, and by inference other gay men who died of AIDS. In other words, I would be saying, “This is what all their penis fancies lead to.” Perhaps, if the art in question was called, “Drawing penises in front of the subway restroom,” but what’s jarring here is the tragic transformation signified by the Tiffany’s context and framing. When Truman Capote’s Holly Golightly (Audrey Hepburn in Blake Edwards’s 1961 film) stands in front of the famous Fifth Avenue display window after a night of partying staring winsomely at diamonds while eating her croissant and coffee one early New York morning, the route that might open that window for her is sleeping with wealthy men. When Keith Haring stands in front of the same window some 20 years later, the baubles, bangles, and bright shiny beads he’s dreaming of will (probably; the exact reason he contracted AIDS was not divulged) ultimately serve as the instrument of his death. Both Holly and Haring arrived from small towns with Big Apple dreams, but oh how the booty of those dreams — of the free lifestyle celebrated by Golightly and pursued by thousands of Hollys and Harings afterwards, perhaps inspired by her story — had changed! And as far as stigmatization goes, well, look at the way society treated each: Holly was lionized — never mind that her means were greased by a lighter form of selling herself; and Keith, or at least the larger social strata which encadred him, gay men, was stigmatized — never mind that unlike Holly he wasn’t using others to get rich, he was just a guy who wanted to have fun.

Are Haring’s drawings of penises in front of Tiffany’s great art? In my view, no. (But, as a colleague here at the DI pointed out to me, who am I to judge?) Viewed with the awareness that he would die of AIDs a decade later, do they make a powerful statement about a prodigious artist, and about how the consequences for innocents who arrived in New York with the dream of living an artful life changed so direly over the span of just two decades, and about the death of innocence? Absolutely. (And even without this social context, when juxtaposed with Haring’s later, technically more sophisticated and graphically more involved and intricate work — as we’ve done on this page — they do in fact help complete the portrait of the artist.)

Contrast this tribute with Suzanne Vega’s “Carson McCullers Talks about Love,” a shallow homage to a complicated artist which takes absolutely no risks in what was billed as an effort to understand the author of “The Heart is a Lonely Hunter,” “The Member of the Wedding,” and other work that played its own part in signifying an earlier era. McCullers championed misfits, and in probing her story, one would have hoped that Vega would have taken a deeper look at the personal idiosyncracies that informed her oeuvre, particularly ‘Heart,’ and made it ring so true. Vega not only avoids exploring these facets — including McCullers’s sexual ambidextrousness – but after making the decision to go with a generic southern accent, she can’t even bother to develop its nuances. Every line has the same cadence, except when she flubs one, which is frequently. The lyrics of the dozen or so songs are trite, which almost has the effect of trivializing their subject; how can one treat a personality whose chief talent was verbal lyricism with such one-dimensional language? The evening appears to have had a director, Kay Matschullat, but desperately needs a dramaturge. Vega’s fascination with McCullers seems to have started with seeing her photo on a book jacket — “She looked like a wise old child,” the singer recalls in a short introduction spoken as herself before dawning a wig and the unfortunate accent — but her stage portrait doesn’t really delve deeper than that one dimension. In effect, Vega has become the man standing outside the window of Tom’s Diner. She has not ventured inside the restaurant, leaving us to wonder if she really sees her subject. One gets the feeling that we’re beholding a sanitized version of an artist, McCullers, who was anything but. Consequently, she has taught us nothing new about the author; we leave the theater no more enlightened than we were coming in.

Barbara Gladstone, the owner of the Gladstone Gallery, could have gone the same route. She could have just presented the three large works on paper Haring painted during the Bill T. Jones / Arnie Zane performance, which, lustrous and enjoyable as they are, would simply have confirmed the Keith Haring we already know, the one who’s art is safe enough to put on coffee cups. But she clearly didn’t want to just profit from the artist — she wanted to serve him and enchance his reputation and the public’s appreciation of his authenticity and understanding of his art. Personally, on a visceral level, I was repulsed by the penis images. But as an art maven recently returned from France, where the performing arts at least still have some intellectual heft and pose difficult questions, to a New York — New York City, skyscrapers and everythang! — where the lively arts (at least as manifest in what I’ve seen) rarely seem to go beyond the surface any more, where the former town crier the Village Voice is a shadow of its former self, where the spectators don’t seem to know the difference, and where the majority of the artists who populate the Chelsea galleries seem to be so lightweight, and most of the curators not to know the difference, I celebrate the opportunity to get to know an artist I thought I already knew even better, and I applaud a gallery owner’s caring enough to provide the opportunity